A Day well-spent!!!

August 18th. One of the crappiest days of my life. A day spent wholly in front of the PC, not at home, but in the Data Structures Lab at college. A day spent literally glued to the rotating chair in the software lab.

There were a few of us. Vinit, Prashant, Swaraj, Darshu, Lina and me. Everyone had come to take the godforsaken printout for the record to be submitted next week. Writing the never-ending 25 programs in the rough record was a gruesome job. And the fact that we have to write all the goddamned algorithms in the fair record made me even more fucked up. There were a lot of them. From Linear Search, Binary Search, Tree traversals, Graphs, to the Turing award winner- Dijkstra’s Algorithm!!! (Now, how the hell do you pronounce that?!!!). Lina and Darshu were the first in line to take the printout. No sooner did Lina take a few pages printed out, the lab assistant declared that they had run out of paper. Goddamn it! What a great start. Today’s gonna be awesome. Someone from the lab rushed out and brought a new bundle of paper and the printing resumed. It took almost an hour to print about 60 papers. Lina isn’t the scapegoat! ;) Our age-old Dot Matrix printer is the one to blame. They say the ‘toner’ of the Laser Printer will go out of ink if everyone took printout from it. So we have no choice but to rely on the Dotty! And it takes a life time to print a few pages, not to mention the time consumed to convert the document from the A4 size format to the Letter format, to make it compatible with our Dotty’s paper feed!!! By the time Lina finished taking printout, it was noon. Darshu was the next. She started off and five pages into the printing, we had even better news. The so-called ‘ribbon’ of the bloody printer had dried out. Bloody hell. Swaraj and Prashant went to fetch a new ribbon. They returned in a few minutes and for the second time, printing resumed. Swaraj got tired of waiting and left. I was determined to take the printout, no matter how long I have to wait.

Meanwhile I went out to the College Store (that’s where we get our record books, and college stationery) to buy a record book. The store had been shifted from its old location, and ya there were a few changes too! The rack that usually held textbooks now stocked a more essential stuff! Whisper Choice!!! For once I felt as if I had entered a medical store, for they had not just a few, but an inventory of it! I could indeed see tangible evidences of a renovated College Store! I brought the record book and a few toffees for the change. I walked back into the lab. The Dotty was still making the obnoxious grating screech and the paper kept moving. I had a chat with everyone, distributed the toffees and got back to my seat. There was nothing to do so I got online and read a few of my friends’ blogs. It was getting late and I was starving. I have this typical problem of getting a headache if I don’t eat on time. I had skipped lunch and I could feel the pain starting to build up. I prefer being in the dark when I have a headache. But now I had no choice. I was staring at the old merciless CRT monitor and the Air Conditioning made me even more uncomfortable. And to top it all, the Dotty’s repugnant shriek was tearing my ears, through the tympanic membrane and going right into my head. I can’t stand even the slightest of sounds when I have a headache. This was unbearable. And unstoppable.

After an hour or so Prashant was into the printing spell. It was when Prashant was almost done with his work, that my Linux Terminal hung. What else can be more annoying?. I was browsing the internet and without a reason my system got stuck. I got furious. I shut the system down and went on to check another one. Unfortunately, none of the systems would let me log in to my account. To fill my slot, Vinit rushed to the printer as soon as Prashant was done. I did what I could (that might mean unfair means, like logging into someone else’s account!) and made the final additions for the document to be printed. Headache got intensified and my temples were getting numbed with pain. I turned off the monitor and sat with my eyes closed. I slept for a while. When I woke up, Vinit had almost finished. I turned on my monitor and logged in. By quarter past three, I was beside Dotty. At last!!! I made the final formatting and gave the document for printing. Mr. Dotty once again started its vicious work. The squeaking and scratching resumed. My headache had subsided, partly cuz I took a short nap, but mainly at the thought that finally, my document is in! Page by page, Dotty printed out Searching, Sorting, Merging and what not. Last 10 pages left and the teacher said "it's almost 4 o’clock". That meant shutting down the lab and going home. I asked for a five minute extra time and got my thing printed.

One more day into my list of well-wasted days! Well, not wasted cent percent, I read a few blogs and browsed Wikipedia, and ya got a topic to write for my blog!!!